Movin' Out - Part 1

The big move. That has been on my mind the most this week. And on the floor of my apartment. This is just a small corner of the chaos I have been living in: The place is in disarray, but it is sort of metaphoric for my state of mind: scattered, disorganized, too much activity in one small place...but an current of excitement underneath it all.

On Monday coming up, we are closing on our house.

Ok, let me back up and tell you how we got here, before I start diving into the internal/mental/emotional/over-emotional aspects of the move.

It is so miraculous that we are in this position. Honestly. It was God. After we got engaged, we didn't really talk about where we would live; we just assumed that we would just rent an apartment. Realistically, that was all we could afford to do.

But one day James mentioned that a guy at work just bought a condo, and put x amount down and only pays y each month. He mentioned that we should look into it. I asked him if he was serious [James 'mentions' a lot of things] - because if he was, I would start researching. He was.

So, I did a few google searches, signed up for a real estate listing that popped up, and soon, I was getting email updates of homes for sale in the area we were looking in. OK, there were a few possibilities. Of some really cute homes. That we could afford.

I have a church friend who does mortgages, so I gave him a call and just asked him to run our numbers and see what he thought. Was this even a realistic possibility??? I told him how much money we had in hand, what we could probably afford a month, our salaries, debt, credit, etc. Did he think we could get approved for a mortgage and how much cash in hand did we need. And I wanted him to factor in every possible, potential cost. If it wasn't realistic, I didn't even want to get my hopes up.

He checked it out and said, 'Yeah, Katie. I can pre-approve you for x amount -and for an FHA (First-time Homebuyer's loan) putting only 3.5% down. With the cash you have, it should be no problem.' And the interest rate he thought we could get? About 5%.

Whoooaaaaa. Deep breath. 3.5% down - we can afford that. The cash in hand needed - we had that. The payments with those rates would be x dollars per month. We can afford that. And that is what we would probably be paying for rent for a 2 bedroom apartment anyway.

Ok. Another deep breath. So this really was a possibility.

All-righty then, here we go. I pulled together a list of addresses, and we went 'shopping' on November 1st. One of the houses on our list was actually having an open house that day. Just went on the market that week. In fact, it was my favorite of all the houses on my list. We went in, took a look around...and we were in love.

We were so excited about the possibility of this house. It was within walking distance from the beach, move-in condition, big kitchen, granite countertops...it seemed perfect for us. We could totally see ourselves raising a family here.

We put an offer in that week. Too low. Her realtors told us that the owner wasn't going to get into a bidding war. She just wanted best offers and then after a week, she would choose. We had met the owner when we were there and really felt a connection with her, so we thought we had a good chance. 'Unofficially,' our realtor told us that it was between us and another couple; the owner felt torn - liked us both. Our realtor said to write a letter...sometimes that can sway the vote. So I did - a darn touching letter, I might add - sincere and honest - but touching.

About a week later, we got the call.

She chose the other couple.

Defeat.

More to come on how this story played out in the next post...

{For those who have read this before, I decided to break the original story into two posts, due to length! Sorry for any confusion!}